Reviews

On Saturday I went canyoning, or as you Americans would call it Canyoneering and the adventure was fun. You suit up in 30°C heat and walk for fifteen minutes through a mountain path before going down to the river and jumping from pool to pool. The natural cooling effect of the water is welcome. As you go down the river so you get opportunities to jump from a variety of heights, from 7 meters to 11 meters. Land the wrong way and your palms may hurt. That’s not actually the point of this post. The point of this post is to speak about how much fun it is to spend your time going down a river in such a fun and relaxing manner. The drawback is that most cameras are not waterproof. The Nexus one mobile phone for example would be afraid. You may regret bringing it along. That’s why I have a new photo camera. It’s the Olympus Stylus Tough 8010. It’s a small drop proof waterproof camera rated to 10 meters below the surface. That means I can jump from 11 meters with it in my clothing and it should survive for me to take pictures of the next people jumping down. In a little over a week I’ll be playing with this camera during a rafting trip so I’ll upload the pictures at that point, if i don’t end up in the lake before then. I’ll leave you with a test gallery of pictures taken with the new camera. [flickr-gallery mode=“photoset” photoset=“72157624545521618”]

Waiting for the iPhone4 to come out in the hope to do mobile video editing is not necessary. Vericorder have come out with an app for that. The app is a simple to use video, recording and voice over recording app that allows for video editing and distribution to be possible on the move. There are three modes, record video, take photographs and record voice. Each of these modes allows you to gather material, name the clip and then record the next shot. The project tab allows you to add video clips to the sequence, shortening and sorting the videos in the order you want. After that is done go to the voice ovee app, record the audio, transcribe what you have said before adding the audio track to the timeline. Once that is done save the project. Export the video, chose send as video and you will have a finished edited news item. It is intuitive to use. Within ten minutes of use I understood how it works and simplz need to find events furring which to test the applicAtion.

Recently I started using feedly which is a great tool for managing rss feeds and content into an easy to view form. Connecting with google reader, friendfeed and a number of other surfaces it provides you with three principle displays for viewing the content you have selected to have aggregated. The first display shows your content by theme. In my case these themes are social media, video, technology, explore, and of course my own content output, to some degree. From this display I can quickly see a number of topics. The second display is named digest. It displays three of the top unread stories with the title and a quick description of the articles in each category. You can cycle through these articles using the ever popular J and K keys, j for going back, K for going forwards. A counter tells you how many items are left for each category. The list view gives you a quick headline for every blog post. It’s a quick way to go through your rss feeds. The articles expand to their full length once they have been selected. [caption id=“attachment_1010” align=“aligncenter” width=“307” caption=“Conversation tracking according to article”][/caption] Above is what I think is the most interesting feature of all. It’s a demonstration of how feedly is integrated into your every day browsing. Anytime you go to a blog you’re made aware of the conversation that is taking place and how active it is. You may also share that content to a number of platforms, from google reader to friendfeed, twitter and more to add. You can add a note to explain why you think that blog post is relevant to your readers. Of course the reason I love this application, requiring firefox, so much is that it allows for the entire world wide web to be something your share with those who are interested in where your attention is being drawn. It syncs with google reader, integrates with friendeed and just provides a great all round user experience. I strongly recommend using it.

There are some films we may not intentionaly go to see. Der Baader Meinhof-Komplex is one of them. The English title is The Baader Meinhof Complex. The film takes a look at the beginning of theRed Army Faction, in Germany. It is based on the book The “Baader-Meinhof Group” by Stefan Aust. For more information

I was in Pully this weekend for the fifty year celebrations of the City Club Cinema celebrating half a century of existence. There were a number of special events, from a silent film being screened with a live orchestra to a number of documentaries being screened as well. I particularly enjoyed the documentary screenings because the documentary producers and some of those interviewed in those documentaries came to the screenings and presented their films before the film and answered some questions at the end. The documentary the I enjoyed, or at least found most interesting was “La Citadelle Humanitaire”, a documentary by Frédéric Gonseth and Catherine Azad. It explored the work done by André Rochat when he worked for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Yemen in the 1960s. The documentary explored the interesting work carried out by these humanitarian workers and the challenges they faced. It was told as much by André rochat as those that worked with him. It showed some of the challenges they faced, from where to situate the hospital to having more mobility, facilitating prisoner exchanges up to the point of hostage releases being negotiated successfully. It’s a great piece of documentary making and within the next few days a few of the Q&A questions should appear on this blog as well as my own. A second documentary that I watched, but that did not appeal to me quite as much was La Reina del Condòn by Silvana Czeschi and Reto Stamm. It confused me. I couldn’t see why an East German would come to Cuba to speak about Sexual liberation in a machist country. I couldn’t see any of her motivations in carrying out such a project. If I had produced the documentary that’s what i would have concentrated on. I would have interviewed her more extensively, spent more time exploring the personality and the motivations behind what she did. What we had instead was an exploration of three or four people’s views which did not make the documentary uninteresting so much as that famous “So what?” question that an English teacher used to always ask me to elaborate on. It’s the same with this film. I simply think the exposition could have been more researched. Umare Te Wa Mita Keredo (Les Gosses de Tokyo) by Jasujiro Ozu is a 1930s film from Japan looking at two children at this specific moment in time. It’s a silent movie where the two main characters are Children and a few days out of their lives. What made this screening special was the live four piece orchestra playing live at the front of the Room. Finally Lars and the Real Girl was also screened. It was a strange topic to be explored but it made me think of the Film Parle Avec Elle to some extent, the role of online and offline relationships as well as dealing with people with certain characteristics. It’s a comedy and as a result you’ll spen some time laughing but at the same time it’s a reflective film into how we behave. I found the film to be quite interesting but another individual said that it was a little too slow so it’s hard to say whether you’d enjoy it. Overall I enjoyed being at the City Club for their fiftieth anniversary, having interesting people to meet and good documentaries to watch.

Having just noticed that the new gmail application for S60 is out I have noticed some interesting new features, the most interesting of which for some of you may be the accounts tab so that you may use more than one gmail account at once. Other features include Chats, outbox, mobile drafts, Chat, contacts and more. One of the more interesting options now is that you can search through your e-mails straight from the application on the phone rather than using the website. As a result it’s far easier to find that particular e-mail with flight information or the route you were planning on taking.

Yestereday night when I should have been sleeping I downloaded a web server for the Nokia N95 8GB and so far it’s been a lot of fun (albeit a little slow). It has blogging, messaging, photo galleries and more and here’s a little run down of what the interesting features are. if you’re logged in then you see a number of features: Blogging: This feature allows you to write blog posts and post them. Commenting is possible. Camera: There are two options, the first one allows you to take pictures remotely. I can take pictures from my laptop when I want to. The second is photo requesting. this feature allows for those visiting your website to ask for a picture of something, for example “I want a picture of the restaurant”. Take the phone, take a picture of the restaurant and send it to the person that may be coming soon. The Gallery: The gallery has three options. The first of these options is that you select which pictures you want to share. The second option is to share all phone memory pictures whilst the third is to share all memory card pictures. Guestbook I haven’t played with this feature yet but it’s pretty self explanatory. Contact me. There are two ways by which for someone to contact you from the mobile site. the first is by short IM and the second is by SMS. Both of these work quite well even with slow connection speeds. Presence The presence Availability information consists of “Active profile - Silent”, in other words that the phone is silent. That would mean there’s little chance I’ll hear the phone if you call. “Calendar availability - Available lets you know that I’m available. “Call state - Call inactive” means that you can call me since I am not currently using the phone. Webchat allows those on the site to chat with the web server user. Calendar The calendar is a quick way to see what events are planned and for when Messaging: It’s a nice way of seeing the messages people have sent you and when, in other words you can see all the sms you’ve received on your phone remotely. It’s not something you’d share with the world. Unread messages appear in bold. Phone Log. Allows you to see all phone traffic on your phone with the usual three distinctions Contacts, allows you to see all your contacts. Conclusion With more ubiquitous wifi and more forgiving data plans we can expect more and more people to carry the webserver with them. If I take pictures of an event you can connect to my phone and look at the pictures I’ve taken. It’s also an easy way of sharing those embarrasing photos with friends. There’s no video support yet but that’s sure to come and there are other options ready already. Editing from the phone is fast so blogging from the phone makes more sense than via a laptop, in relation that part of your site. There is also an RSS feed which means that those following you can automatically download any content you generate for viewing when your phone is out of range of free wifi or you select not to use the data plan. The downside is that it uses battery and the connection drops fairly frequently. Data plans that are only a few megabytes large would soon end up costing you more than it’s worth. The connection speeds are slow so doing anything is laborious. For more information

There are a lot of applications that are available both for the Ipod touch and Iphone and here is a quick run down of applications that you may enjoy using. MiGhtyDocs MiGhtyDocs is an application that makes looking at your google documents easy. It allows you to view offline any document that you have consulted on either the touch or the Iphone. It’s limited in that you can’t do any editing from the device itself. Twittervision For those that enjoy using twitter and the international aspect this application allows you to see tweets from around the world as they’re sent out. It’s limited in that you can’t yet to select just your friend’s tweets. Tumble Tumble is the companion app to your use of tumblr. If you’re taking pictures, finding links you want to share or more it allows you access to the functionality of Tumblr whilst mobile. LinkedIn The Linkedin app has four main parts. The first of these is to show your contacts latest’ actions on the social networking website. The second option labelled connections shows you everyone that is in your contact book. Click on any contact and you get a few extra details. The third option is search if you’re looking for something specific. The final icon, the megaphone shows your contact’s status, whether they’re looking to hire people or any message they may feel like sending. Newton’s cradle Newton’s cradle is a little bit of fun. As a child we’ve all played with the cradle. It’s the one that has the four balls hanging and the one on one end taps into the three others and only the third bounces away. It detects the attitude of the device and can be a nice method of procrastination Audi A4 The audi a4 game is a blatant bit of advertising. It’s a driving game and the controls are very simple. Right pedal for acceleration, left pedal to break. You control the car by tilting the phone either to the right or left. It’s not that hard to play and it won’t be such a challenge to get the hang of the controls. Labyrinth LE Labyrinth LE is that platform you played with as a child. It’s a plank of wood with holes and walls. As you tilt the plank of wood (iphone or ipod touch) so the ball rolls with gravity. The tilt sensors work well on this game and it’s another way of making those moments of inactivity less boring. Pyramid Lite Pyramid lite is a card game where the aim is to add two cards together to get to a total of 13. Gottago Gottago makes it easy for you to plan your trips both within Switzerland and to outside. Select the city you’re leaving from and the city you want to get to. Do a quick search and it will provide you with a number of routes you can take. SBBTimetable It’s the same as gottago but by the CFF/SBB. Speedtest This is an application that allows you to test the connection speed of whatever you’re using to surf the web from on the ipod touch or iphone.

Gmail, google Calendar and google maps are part of our daily workflow. As a result of this we have them running in two or three tabs at all times. Switching between tabs within a browser can be time consuming but not between applications. That’s where Adobe Air and GMDesk come in. Adobe Air is a multiplatform solution to make running the same app on multiple machines easy. GMDesk is an application that allows you to use the applications I have mentioned above easily. Work in your web browser, alt tab and you’re in GMdesk. Those are the short cut keys to save on time when switching from one google app to another. It’s an interesting idea and we should be seeing many more applications such as this in the near future.

is an automated service that grabs videos from RSS feeds and converts them to 3gpp for easy download to the N95 and other mobile phones running the s60 OS. There are a number of default shows including MobuzzTV, Zefrank, National Geographic, DiggNation, Rocketboom and a number of other well known shows. In the right hand column you have another four methods of accessing content, searching, browsing according to keywords, highest rated or what’s new. The second option is to browse through the directories they have selected to find the categories that are closest to your particular interests.